Herman: Another presidential campaign, another Texan who wants the job

Ken Herman @kherman

Saturday

Jan 12, 2019 at 4:20 PMJan 12, 2019 at 4:48 PM

SAN ANTONIO — Here’s something you’ve heard a time or several already this century: A Texan has decided to run for president.

Former San Antonio Mayor and HUD Secretary Julián Castro’s candidacy announcement Saturday came after a brief “exploratory” effort that ended the way those things always do. Can anyone recall such an exploration reporting back with anything less than widespread enthusiasm for the explorer’s presidential candidacy?

And so it was on Saturday at Castro’s well-stagecrafted event, complete with live video of the candidate as he rolled via city bus (the No. 68 he said he rode as a kid) to the event at Plaza Guadalupe on San Antonio’s West Side.

“I want you all to look around this neighborhood,” he told the outdoor crowd. “There are no front-runners that are born here. But I’ve always believed that, with big dreams and hard work, anything is possible in this country.”

Indeed, a successful end to this presidential campaign would give us a White House resident from an unlikely background and with a name that would have sounded even more unusual if we hadn’t had a president named Barack Obama. Castro’s campaign logo has his first name in big letters and his surname in much smaller ones. “One nation. One destiny,” it says.

Like many of the plethora of Democrats who will seek to craft themselves as the best anti-Trump, Castro will try to find a Democratic lane in which he can distinguish himself from the crowd. He has two potential lanes, the younger lane (he’s 44) and the Hispanic lane. Finding a lane is crucial in presidential primary battles in which many candidates share the same positions on issues.

Castro touched on those Saturday, sticking to identifying the problems (education, health care, immigration, housing, justice, etc.) and promising proposals in the campaign to come. In front of a crowd that seemed eager to hate on President Donald Trump, Castro kept Trump mentions to a minimum, including riffing on Trump’s declaration of a crisis on the border.

“There is a crisis today. It’s a crisis of leadership,” Castro said. “Donald Trump has failed to uphold the values of our great nation.”

As a younger candidate (perhaps defined this go-round as pre-Medicare eligibility), he’ll have multiple rivals. But Castro could be alone in the Hispanic lane, where his only possible rivals include Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. And then there’s Hispanic-by-hometown ex-U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, he of the recent unsuccessful U.S. Senate race that somehow propelled him into potential presidential timber. O’Rourke says he’s made no decision on a White House bid, but he’s been keeping his name and face out there by doing such things as growing a beard and posting a recent open-mouth photo of a dental appointment, giving him perhaps the most famous political teeth since George Washington and inviting endless Twitter pleas for him to spare us visual evidence of any upcoming, more invasive and private procedures.

And stay tuned for Beto with Oprah next month!

O’Rourke vs. Castro would be an interesting intra-Texan battle as the Dem primaries get rolling.

Back in October at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, Castro said, “it’s just been a long time since we had a Texas Democrat in the White House. And whether it’s me or somebody else, I think we should have a Texas Democrat in the White House soon.”

The most likely somebody else would be O’Rourke, who’s close enough to Castro and twin brother U.S. Rep. Joaquín Castro, D-San Antonio, to have engaged in a little electoral collusion with them. At the book event in October, Julián Castro said his twin brother thought about running against incumbent GOP Sen. Ted Cruz last year, “but (Joaquín) and Beto are friends and so they talked that out and Beto really wanted to run and we’re glad that he has.”

We should know fairly soon if there’ll be a Castro-O’Rourke, among others, presidential nomination battle.

We had a relatively short-lived battle between two Texans seeking their party’s 2016 presidential nomination when Cruz and ex-Gov. Rick Perry were in the early cast of 16 GOP contenders. That battle of the Texans didn’t go very far because Perry didn’t get very far, and he was relegated to the second-tier candidates’ debate so he never shared a debate stage with Cruz, who was a top-tier guy.

Though several Texans have run for president in recent go-rounds, many have chosen to announce out of state. Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign began in March 2015 at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. Perry’s 2016 bid, which went even worse than his 2012 bid, got off to a hot start, mostly because it was in a sweltering airplane hangar in Addison, north of Dallas. He began his 2012 campaign in August 2011 in Charleston, S.C.

Carly Fiorina, who was born in Austin but raised outside Texas, announced her campaign for president in 2015 on ABC's “Good Morning America.”

George W. Bush formally kicked off his successful 2000 presidential campaign in June 1999 in Amana, Iowa.

Former GOP U.S. Rep. Ron Paul began his 2012 presidential campaign in May 2011 in Exeter, N.H. His 2008 campaign began in March 2007 in a C-SPAN interview.

Let’s end the start of a Texan’s 2020 presidential bid by re-raising this prediction: It’s only a question of how long it will be until Trump refers to Castro as Fidel.

Yes, there are still some things in this life you can bank on.

Here’s another one: It won’t take long for GOP attacks on Castro to begin. In fact, they did in a conference call by Texas GOP Chairman James Dickey on Saturday morning prior to the Castro event.

Here we go. May we wind up better off than where we are.

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